Tuesday the 28th of october we will be at the Science Fair with Wally 340. To show our results of this project, come see us!

This last week we’ve been stressing a tiny bit because we don’t have much time left. Next tuesday, Wally 340 needs to be up and running.

So we’ve been busy. Remember that red list we posted last time with all the parts that still needed to be printed and put into Solidworks? Well everything is printed and ordered now. There are only a few parts left to put in Solidworks.

Everything is printed, we are working hard to finish everything in SW.

We did have some troubles:

The needlebeds: we edited this in solidworks, we enlarged the slides with 10 millimeters, but while laserprinting the perspex, it started to melt and bend. The bed started breaking when we were picking up the parts. The melted and bended perspex has influence on the strength of the neeldebed and the movement space of the needles.

results of the perspex after laserprinting

Perspex is not strong enough, with the enlarged slides, so we needed to find a resolution. We tried a different material; wood triplex, but we think that this will create too much fraction. We put the needlebeds together with the triplex bed and the result was not as perfect as we would have liked it. We tried to make one of the printed beds smoother with silicone spray, unfortunately it did not work out. As you can see in the pictures, the needles won’t slide back down. Without spraying the beds with silicone spray the needles do. So we will not spray them to make the needlebeds as smooth as possible. We want wally to work, so this is a big problem we need to solve.

triplex printedbed

not silicone sprayed

silicone sprayed

The frame: We completed the design of the frame. The frame needed to be rebuilt, stronger without moving when wally is knitting. For better stability we added aluminum plates. And for extra support we 3D printed little connecting parts.

aluminium plate

3D printed parts placed in the frame

3D printed parts

The bears: The bears we printed did not fit properly in the new frame. The new frame has some different dimensions. So we needed to make some small changes to make them fit.

The Teeth: We did some experiments on the teeth. We’ve tested them in different shapes and 3D printers to minimize the resistance of the teeth on the wool. We printed them with:

teeth printing experiment

ultimaker 2, with edited density [white]

Objet printer Eden 260 [blue]

Form1+ high resolution [black]

We will test all 3 different teeth in Wally, we expect that the white ones will work the best. These are printed very smoothly, without any flexibility.

Building: We are finishing wally 340 tomorrow, we are building as fast as we can. The carriage and beds are finished already. Keep posted!

see you tuesday!!

Tuesday the 28th of october we will be at the Science Fair with Wally 340. To show our results of this project, come see us!